Incidentalità e dipendenza da sostanze: studio preliminare dei fattori psicologici

Summary Objective Human factors, comprising psychological ones, represent the principal causes of road traffic accidents. Research on psychological factors, massively present in road traffic accidents, has especially focused on personality factors and stressful life events. Psy- choanalytically-oriented investigators attribute some of these accidents to unconscious motivations. We here define as an "accident" a clinically significant traumatic event (demand for care). In this study we tested whether there are differences regarding per- sonality, stressful life events, recent conscious emotional states, accident history, and potentially traumatic experiences in people with addictive behaviour. We consider the "repeated accident" phenomenon as a distinct clinical entity, not to be confused with the one commonly called "accident proneness". Our hypothesis is that in accidents multiple psychological factors are at play, both simple and complex, and trig- ger a psychic process which is independent from a particular personality structure. Methods The study was carried out on 120 subjects, subdivided in two groups on the basis of the presence or absence of an accident during the two previous years. Comparisons included a semistructured interview, Paykel's Scale for stressful life events, TPQ (a personality test) and DES (a scale assessing the presence of dissociative symptoms). We also distinguished a "single accident" group from a "repeated accident" one. Finally, we compare the accident group coming from a Drug Addiction Service (SERT) with a group recruited in a previous study at the Emercency Department of the General Hos- pital of Padua and consisting of otherwise healthy, non-addicted individuals.